This
week we discussed active parenting and the role that it plays in our children’s
lives. Parents should be involved actively in their children’s lives. Over the
course of the semester I’ve learned about various styles of parenting such as
active parenting, passive parenting, etc. When a person has a child, they ought
to take an active role in their life and be mindful of what kind of person they’re
being raised into.
That
being said, parenting should be done intentionally and not without purpose.
This means that the parents should have planned together what they’re going to
do and how they’ll do it.
Children and people in general have
instinctive needs that if not met, they find other ways to try to meet them.
These needs are as follows:
Contact
and Belonging – having physical touch and felling that you have a place wehre you
belong.
Power – Having control over things in your life
and what you do.
Protection – feeling safe and secrure in your environment
and in relationships.
Withdrawal
– the ability to have space and independence from others.
Challenge – drive and purpose.
As a parent, you should be mindful of age
appropriate ways to meet these needs in your child’s life.
In
understanding contact and belonging, our professor shared a story about a
hospital in the 1940s. The maternity wing was divided into two. On one side the
infants were much more likely to live then on the other. The hospital couldn’t
figure out what was the cause of this and tried several ways of fixing the
problem. At first, they thought that it might be because one side wasn’t as
clean, so they cleaned that entire section, but still saw no difference. Then
they swapped out the doctors and nurses, yet still no change. Finally, one
night as one of the heads of the hospital had been taking a walk around the maternity
wing, he noticed a little old lady, stopping by each baby and holding them for
a while before moving on. The man approached her and asked if she did this
every night. She answered that her job was to dust around at night and that she
would visit each baby and comfort them as she went around every night. After learning
this, the hospital had her moved to the other side, where the babies weren’t as
likely to live, and immediately a difference was seen. The side where the
children had been doing well, saw a drastic decline and the other side an
increase. Once learning that contact was the difference, they hired more people
to come in at night to touch and hold the infants.
Just
as contact is important, so are the other needs. Without them, it’s harder to
successfully interact with society and feel satisfied with life.